Despite advances in many areas of technology, there are still barriers to assessing the relative health of a person in a rapid, cost effective, and timely manner. With the increase in health care costs and prevalence of diseases related to unhealthy lifestyles such as diabetes and heart disease, it is important to assess the relative health of individuals, and this has not been adequately addressed. Moreover, in many areas of the world access to doctors is limited. Even in the developed world, a doctor's time is considered a precious commodity and there are often long waiting lists and doctor-to-specialist referral systems that have to be navigated before being seen. Accordingly, it can be very difficult to gain access to medical professionals in order to receive information about one's health.
Over recent years, fitness tracking devices have been employed to monitor the health and activity of individuals. Devices for biological and physiological monitoring, such as for blood pressure, heartrate and temperature, can communicate via Bluetooth or other wireless protocol to a computing device. Behavioral and activity monitoring can also be provided via one or more devices, such as pedometers and other accelerometer-based devices, which can also send signals representing fitness activity of an individual wirelessly to one or more computing devices. Moreover, hardware has been integrated and implemented in communication devices, such as smart phones, and used in tracking user activity, as well as biological and physiological information. Unfortunately, such tracking devices operate in an isolated fashion and do not collectively contribute to provide an accurate and timely representation of a person's biological, physiological and/or activity-based conditions.
More recently, mobile apps have been developed that integrate signals received from various fitness tracking devices. Exercise goals can be defined by users of such apps, and as a user exercises, the user can be informed of how well he or she is doing to meet such goals. For example, active diaries (e.g., provided by “Moves” app) can record walking, cycling, running and other activity, and also present reports for users regarding distance, duration, number of steps taken and number of calories burned for respective activities.
Despite recent advances in fitness tracking technology, fitness activity continues to be represented in misleading ways and requires user input and manual intervention to correct for inaccuracy.